News & Insights

Malcolm Gladwell has good news for underdogs: There probably is a way to win. But it’s definitely not the easy way. “Most people who are running a weak team would rather do the easy thing and lose than do the hard thing and win,” Gladwell said Wednesday at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference in Phoenix. The

It’s tempting to be bad—but is it worth it to your reputation? “I see enough of it—it must be working,” Susan Credle, Leo Burnett’s chief creative officer, said about the attention-grabbing “bad advertising” trend. “I think it works in the moment. This is short-term thinking, versus having the patience of having a longer term goal,”

Fueled by a desire to compare TV and digital advertising metrics head-to-head, as well as a refusal to wait long periods for comparable measurements, Pepsi took on the messy media landscape—and measured its way to better media buys. Jim Totten, Pepsi’s director of analytics, NA beverages, and the teams at Pepsi spent the last year

Over the last six years, TV networks’ Twitter accounts have gone from being little more than promotional outlets for tune-in messaging to real-time channels for networks and advertisers to interact with highly engaged audiences. Evan Silverman, SVP, digital media for A&E networks, says that advancements in social TV analytics are giving the industry a way

Who are the true super heroes of your brand—the ones who drive the bulk of your sales and evangelize your products to others? New research from The Cambridge Group, a part of Nielsen, shows that it’s not the top 20 percent. Rather, it’s the top 10 percent of consumers who are driving the lion’s share—up

Tailoring a marketing campaign to a specific demographic is a great way to maximize impact, but it may not always be economically feasible. And that’s what Time Warner Cable wanted to find out when it analyzed subscriber data using Nielsen’s Marketing Mix Modeling system. Would it make economic sense to tailor its message to Hispanics?

Understanding why TV advertisers focus on prime time viewers isn’t rocket science, but it does lead to a key question: What about daytime viewers? Does placing too much emphasis on prime time leave more on the table than we think it does? Discovery Communications found that daytime viewers can be just as lucrative as a

Trade promotion spend is, on average, more than twice that of advertising spend. But the analytical rigor behind it often significantly lags the rigor behind measuring ad effectiveness. As a result, promotional performance varies widely, with 40 percent of promotions generating no incremental volume—and many losing money. In many cases, teams simply adopt a “what

The line between browsing and buying online and offline is blurring as technology enables nearly everything to become a digital touch point for consumers. A wall suddenly becomes a virtual store and brands can create apps that provide personalized recommendations for what to buy in-store. “E-commerce is not just a channel, it’s a window that

Viewers have been time-shifting for years. Now they are “place-shifting.” After an explosion of choices, and the ability to choose when to watch favorite shows, television consumers can now shift back and forth between devices. While TV consumption still overwhelmingly dominates, the penetration and usage of other devices is growing exponentially. And share of television